The White House National Strategic Computing Initiative Workshop will be held next week in McLean, Virginia at the Hilton McLean Tysons Corner. The workshop will take place from Tuesday, October 20, 2015, at 8:45 A.M. – 5:30 P.M. and Wednesday, October 21, 2015, at 9:00 A.M. – 3:30 P.M. The themes include convergence of data-intensive and numerically intensive computing, hardware technology for future HPC (beyond Moore’s law), and improving productivity in HPC application development and deployment and workforce development. The day one keynote speaker is Dr. Thomas Theis, on assignment from the IBM Corporation to serve as the Executive Director of the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative (NRI) at the Semiconductor Research Corporation. The day two keynote speaker […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is pleased to accept nominations for the 2016 Alan T. Waterman Award. The Waterman Award is NSF’s highest honor. Each year, the Foundation bestows the award to recognize the talent, creativity, and influence of a singular young researcher. Congress established the Alan T. Waterman Award in August 1975 to mark the 25th Anniversary of the NSF and to honor its first Director. The annual award recognizes an outstanding young researcher in any field of science or engineering supported by the NSF. In addition to a medal, the awardee receives a grant of $1,000,000 over a five year period for scientific research or advanced study in the mathematical, physical, […]

The MacArthur Foundation has named its 2015 class of MacArthur Fellows, recognizing 24 exceptionally creative individuals with a track record of achievement and the potential for significant contributions in the future. Fellows will each receive a no-strings-attached stipend of $625,000, paid out over five years. The Fellowship comes with no stipulations or reporting requirements, and allows recipients maximum freedom to follow their own creative visions. One of the fellows is John Novembre, a computational biologist in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Chicago, who is shedding new light on human evolutionary history, population structure and migration, and the etiology of genetic diseases. Another one of the fellows is Christopher Ré, […]

The U.S. Department of Commerce‘s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced the next round of the Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC) at a White House Smart City Forum hosted by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). See the White House Fact Sheet to read all the announcements made at the Forum. NIST announced that the kick-off conference for the next round of the Global City Teams Challenge will take place November 12-13, 2015 at NIST’s Campus in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Registration for the conference is now open. Please use this link to register. There is no registration fee. Pre-registration is required and closes November 5, 2015. The draft agenda can […]

Samsung recently announced that it will allow more of its products to interact with its competitors’. Starting with this year’s Gear S2, a smart watch, all future devices will be able to connect with any smartphone running Google Inc’s Android operating system 4.4 and higher. Prior to this, Samsung’s smart watches required a Samsung smartphone. This business decision is part of the larger trend of the growing importance of the Internet of Things (IoT). Internet of Things is a catch-all term to describe the network of physical objects or “things” embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity, which enable these objects to collect and exchange data. This includes devices such […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Computing in the Physical World Task Force has just released a community whitepaper on Systems Computing Challenges in the Internet of Things. The Task Force, lead by CCC Council Member Ben Zorn from Microsoft Research, is looking at core research challenges that the Internet of Things (IoT) presents. This whitepaper highlights these challenges and provides recommendations that will help address inadequacies in existing systems, practices, tools, and policies. The recommendations are summarized below: Invest in research to facilitate the construction, deployment, and automated analysis of multi-component systems with complex and dynamic dependences. IoT systems by their nature will have dynamic membership and operate in unknown and unpredictable environments that include, […]